Key Pages
- |Changes [Feb 26, 2009]
The cameraYou can read my Wiki Log - a collection of thoughts about the process of our collaborative 2006 Knossos Project: Sites of the Imagination.
Courtyard is my contribution to the project where I examine the Knossos central court as public space.
Knossos: Sites of the Imagination Presentation is a site specifically created for the oral presentation of our group to Michael Shanks and the class.
I'm very interested in places of all kinds. I love to travel - visit ancient and modern towns, cities, metropolises.. I am fascinated by how people relate to place, for example how a place where they are born or were raised affects them and draws them back throughout their lives, how the architecture of a place affects the environment with in it, the presence or lack of public spaces and its impact on civil society, and the effects of humans to "inhabiting" increasingly virtual spaces with the advent of modern technology.
In addition to defined places, I'm interested in overlapping places like borderlands, where different people and cultures come together. Because of this interest I am intrigued by the lifestyle of gipsys, nomads and imigrants that transcend borders. I listen to jazz and Spanish gitano music - genres that constantly break old rules and boundaries existing in an ephemeral space with freedom and flight.
Some of my favorite books/authors and things written are:
Speaking of borders, here is a very good poem on the subject called "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost:
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Marc Chagall's Birthday
